“It is my lady. O, it is my love!
O that she knew she were!
She speaks. Yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses. I will answer it.
I am too bold. ‘Tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there in her head?
The brightness of those cheeks would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp. Her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!”
Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 10-25.

“Among her golden locks Love hid the noosewith which he held me tight;and from those lovely eyes there came the icethat passed into my heartwith all the force of unexpected splendour:merely recalling itdrives every other wish out of my heart.

Since then I have been cheated of the sightof her blond hair, alas;and her bright glancing eyes have taken flight,leaving me at a loss;but, since to die well is a cause of honour,no death, no miserywill make me beg Love for my liberty.”-Petrarch, Canzoniere, 59 Perche quel che mi trasse ad amar prima, 4-17.

“…this alone is certain, namely that there is no such thing as certainty, and that nothing is more wretched or more conceited than man. Indeed the remainder of living creatures have food as their only anxiety, a department in which nature’s largesse is itself sufficient. And the good thing preferable to all others is the fact that these creatures do not think about glory, money, ambition, ambition nor, above all, about death.”-Pliny The Elder, Natural History, BKII xxv.

How Shall I hold my soul, that it may not
be touching yours? How shell I lift it then
above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot,
with some lost thing the dark is isolating
on some remote and silent spot that, when
your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.

You and me-- all that lights upon us, though,
brings us together like a fiddle-bow
drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinists holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.

Some Goethe from 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' [a very influential novel on the romantics across Europe].

“At times I cannot grasp that she can love another man, that she dare love another man, when I love her and her alone with such passion and devotion, and neither know nor have anything but her.”3rd September.

“Ah this void! this terrible void I feel in my breast!—I often think that if only I could hold her to my heart for once, just once, that void would be entirely filled.”19th October.

“It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.”20th December

The wretchedness of non-reciprocal love has never been better expressed than in this novel in my opinion

Children have a lesson adults should learn, not to be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so "safe", and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure. Malcolm X

“Lovers get less pleasure
Than pain: let them steel their hearts
To endless hardship. As thick as Sicily’s swarming
Bees, or hares on Athos, or the grey
Olive-tree’s clustering yield, or shells on the shore, so many
Are the pains of love: there’s gall for us in those pricks.”
~Ovid, Ars amatoria [The Art Of Love], 515-20.

I came upon this while listening to an album called 'Shusha' by Shusha Guppy, who left Perisa for Europe before the Islamic revolution took place. I only know about her because my Dad has some of her records, which he bought after going to see her in concert in a small village hall somewhere near Preston. One of the songs is set to this poem, but I didn't know that Ralegh was also a poet:

As you came from the holy land
Of Walsingham,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?

"How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one,
I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?"

She is neither white, nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth, or the air.

"Such a one did I meet, good sir,
Such an angelic face,
Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear
By her gait, by her grace."

She hath left me here all alone,
All alone, as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself,
And me loved as her own.

"What's the cause that she leaves you alone,
And a new way doth take,
Who loved you once as her own,
And her joy did you make?"

I have lov'd her all my youth;
But now old, as you see,
Love likes not the falling fruit
From the withered tree.

Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promise past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.

His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy:
He is won with a world of despair,
And is lost with a toy.

Of womenkind such indeed is the love,
Or the word love abus'd,
Under which many childish desires
And conceits are excus'd.

But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.

Its fun to try and read as he wrote it, but hard to understand at times.